Thursday 6 April 2023

Maenam Thai Food for Lunch


With an ingredient driven menu featuring the freshest ingredients, Maenam never fails to bring the flavour with Thai food. Maenam has mastered traditional favourites like Pad Thai, various curries and roti. Opening in 2009, Maenam had been a dinner focused restaurant, but has recently expanded their meal service to lunch. The team always goes above and beyond to create memorable moments for their patrons and have collected numerous awards, accolades and most recently the Bib Gourmand Award from the Michelin Guide. 

If it were up to me, I would have Maenam's Pad Thai daily because I love the sweet, tangy, savoury flavour combination. I can devote an entire blogpost to their Pad Thai, but it would be remiss of me to not mention their other food offerings as well as their stellar cocktail program. 

All of the lunch specials are accompanied by steamed rice, a daily soup and salad. On the day I went, there was a lovely clear broth daikon soup and a fresh green mango salad. The Red Gati Duck Leg was ordered by my friend. The confit duck leg was simmered in an aromatic red coconut curry with sweet peppers, Thai eggplant and holy basil. 

I had the Hat Yai Fried Chicken which is a marinated fried chicken with coriander salt and fried shallots. It was served with roti and nahm jim gai sweet chili sauce. The chicken was delicious, but I wish it had a curry sauce because eating fried chicken with plain steamed rice felt incomplete. My friend had the lovely red coconut curry and I was a bit jealous because I wanted some sort of sauce or curry. Everything just tastes better with curry and that is a universal fact!

Maenam has an incredible cocktail program which includes several mocktails. The mocktail scene has been exploding in popularity across North America and it is high time acohol-free beverages recieve the same care and treatement as their alcoholic counterparts.  I wish I could remember the names of the cocktails and to my utter frustration, the cocktail menu is not online, so I am going to simply describe the flavours. There was a Virgin Mango Thai & Ginger which had the sweetness from pureed mango and with the fizziness and spice from the ginger beer. The Passionfruit drink was delicious and had chilli powder in it giving it a kick. The Lychee Lemonade is always a win with me because Lychee fruit has such a lovely soft floral almost rose sweetness to it and pairs beautifully with citrus. Lastly, we had to to do Maenam's Thai Iced Tea which is made from their strong house-brewed Thai tea, palm sugar and milk. 

My pictures are a few months old. Maenam has recently renovated their dining room which I need to go and see for myself. From what I have seen online, the wooden tables have been replaced with olive-green tone tables and flanking one of the walls is a large fuschia pink-hued painting. The shades of pink and green that Maenam has chosen go well together. We love a bold bright dining room!

Hoping to get my fix of Maenam's Pad Thai and cocktails soon!

BYES






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